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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

We were starting to think it’d never happen, but Research in Motion announced that over 120 companies are already testing the BlackBerry 10 platform, which will officially make its debut in January 2013. Though RIM did not drop the names of the users, they hinted that 64 of them are Fortune 500 companies.

“RIM will be visiting some of our enterprise and government ‘early adopters’ and getting them started with the BlackBerry 10 platform,” said Robin Bienfait, CIO of RIM, in a statement. “At RIM, we’ve seen the power of our new enterprise mobility management solution first-hand, and we are thrilled to share BlackBerry 10 directly with these leading organizations.”

If RIM is hush-hush on who their early adopters are, their UK partners are not to timid about sharing their plans as EE, O2 and Vodafone all announced that they’ll be carrying BlackBerry 10 devices come January 2013.

Samsung’s not so selfless act

Samsung surprised the world on Tuesday when they announced that they would withdraw their injunction requests against Apple based on standard essential patents pending in European courts to protect consumers. What many thought was that Samsung would make like HTC and enter into a licensing agreement with Apple, though the company somewhat touched on that subject, they did not actually state that they will be dropping their complaints against Apple – they just dropped their injunction request.

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court,” the firm said in a statement. “In this spirit, Samsung has decided to withdraw our injunction requests against Apple on the basis of our standard essential patents pending in European courts, in the interest of protecting consumer choice.”

Instagram’s new ToS faced with users uproar

Instagram recently revised their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. For Instagram users who didn’t read the new ToS and PP, part of it read that the company will allow Facebook and its other subsidiaries to have access to Instagram users content and it would be used to “experiment with innovative advertising.” This was interpreted as people’s photos could end up in ads and the users would have no say in it because they agreed to the new terms.

Some of the users who read the new terms opted to delete their accounts, such as singer Pink, and urged other users to read the new terms.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom stated that that wasn’t what they meant by the new terms, and admitted that they’ve used a confusing language so they’re working on revising the terms so people better understand what they really mean.

”Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation,” Systrom wrote. ”This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. It is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”

Finnish company Nokia is said to be in talks with Qulacomm and Compal as they ready a 10-inch Windows RT tablet slated for release February 2013. Nokia is said to be teaming with Qualcomm to use the Snapdragon S4 processor in their rumored tablet, which is expected to have some of the great features from their Lumia line of smartphones.

Nokia hasn’t confirmed the rumors, but stated that they “continue to eye the tablet space with interest, but we have not announced any specific plans.” The question now is, would their entrance in the tablet space make any difference for their struggling business, or would they be too late for salvation?

Apple improves Maps with Foursquare

Apple is said to be looking into integrating Foursquare data to their Maps app to deliver information about local businesses and services to their users. The Cupertino giant is said to be pondering on incorporating the location-specific tips Foursquare users leave on various joints to their map apps to give users a better feel of what a certain place offers.

Foursquare pioneered the service wherein people can check-in to places and rate them – rant or rave about the food, service or staff or whatever that place offers to give other people the heads up or what to expect when they go there. Now, Foursquare is competing with other services such as Facebook Places, which may have the upper hand given the fact that there are a lot of Facebook users in the world.

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.